In Canada, Indigenous People Are Part of Daily Life, Not Thanksgiving Lore

In Canada not only does Thanksgiving come earlier in the autumn, but none of the legend surrounding its American version has traveled across the border. There’s no widely shared Canadian variation of the story of the Pilgrims at the Plymouth Plantation and the indigenous people who helped them survive joining together for a harvest festival.

Still, indigenous people are far from an afterthought in Canada. As a Canadian who reports for an American newspaper, I’ve long been struck by the extraordinary contrast between the two countries when it comes to the political and media attention indigenous issues receive.

I’ve written about Canada and Canadians for The New York Times for more than 13 years, including 11 years as the only reporter in the country. All three of us who currently report for The Times on Canada — Catherine Porter, Dan Levin and I — have indigenous stories at or close to the top of our to-do lists. Sometimes those stories reflect issues confronting minorities in the United States. When protests were sweeping the United States over monuments to leaders of the Confederacy, I was writing about the debate over maintaining statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, who introduced a school program to wipe out indigenous culture. We also try to avoid writing articles only about the problems facing indigenous communities. Ms. Porter, for example, recently wrote about attempts to bring indigenous culture into universities.

Generally speaking, indigenous stories are an integral part of the daily news mix in Canada. Even before his government’s election two years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made reconciling with the indigenous population a key priority, and there is a sustained discussion of the struggles native people face here: staggeringly high suicide rates, mostly among their youngest members; the large number of unsolved disappearances and murders of aboriginal women; unsafe drinking water in reserves. They also suffer from overcrowded and unfit housing, higher rates of homelessness and — in a mirror image to the national conversation unfolding in the United States — lopsided incarceration rates: Although indigenous adults make up about 3 percent of the population, they account for 26 percent of people in jail.

American native communities face similar challenges, but it generally takes a big event like the recent Standing Rock protests in North Dakota against an oil pipeline to draw significant media attention. I randomly selected a seven-day period from this month and found that The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper with national circulation, published nine articles entirely about indigenous people and issues, and two letters to the editor. During the same seven days, The Times published three items involving Native Americans, two of them linked to Thanksgiving.

One factor may be sheer numbers. Various indigenous groups account for just under 2 percent of the United States’ population. In Canada, indigenous people add up to about 4.3 percent, and in some provinces they are a major group. In Manitoba, the figure is nearly 17 percent.

It’s a question journalists often encounter: How much of a responsibility do we have to tell the stories of minorities whose communities and cultures are overwhelmed by society’s dominant groups, especially when past coverage has spread gross misrepresentations?

It’s hard not to cringe when looking back at articles involving native people in the The Times’s archive — and not just its 19th-century accounts of settlement of the West. Aboriginal people were often cast as either “savages” or “The Noble Red Man”; indigenous women were almost always “squaws.” In 1906 the paper ran a lengthy profile of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, a Sioux physician, author and early native rights activist. Its author, identified only as C.B., writes at one point of expecting to hear thoughts about Shakespeare or drama “from the gravely smiling lips before me than an approach to the traditional warwhoop of Dr. Eastman’s tribe, albeit it is a matter of record that he has not been unskillful in the giving of warwhoops.”

The Times and other media organizations have worked to leave behind such antic racism. But coverage in the United States, where Thanksgiving is more of an origin story than it is in Canada, remains inconsistent. During the holidays, it’s worth paying attention to the stories that get told of North America’s first peoples.

Correction:Nov. 25, 2017

An earlier version of this article misstated the province in which indigenous groups account for nearly 17 percent of the population. It is Manitoba, not British Columbia.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A2 of the New York edition with the headline: Indigenous Peoples in Canadian News. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe